Noise by Darin Bradley

Scout campouts, we couldn’t even see any constellations—they were too polluted by their own stars, and our dads had to bend the rules to get us our Astronomy Merit Badges, out west at summer camp.
    Even Mary, in her white, was hard to see in the dark when I turned around. I led them straight down the center of the road, between parked and abandoned cars. I wouldn’t take them right up against the historic homes that lined the street because I didn’t want to alarm anyone. I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to think we had come for their things.
    At one house, we heard people talking in the side yard, behind a fence. Male voices.
    …
Take no chances…
.
    I stopped us. Pulled us into a crouching cluster in the middle of the road.
    “Mary,” I ordered. “Cocktail.”
    I couldn’t let this bunch, talking into the dark, get the jump on us.
    She pulled loose a cocktail and set it on the asphalt. Four handed her another to fill the empty lariat.
    “Light it,” I told Four.
    She did, hiding the mostly blue flame with her cupped hands.
    “Levi,”
Prometheus
, “divert their attention.”
    I looked at Mary. Grabbed her shoulder. “You and Four, thirty yards ahead. Get the jump.”
    She grabbed Four, and they took off, sprinting low and quiet. Practicing ninjutsu without the tall grass. You were supposed to run like your hands were holding rails.
    I stood up with Levi, and he threw the cocktail.
    •   •   •

    On my twenty-first birthday, Adam and I went bar-hopping around the Strip. On the way home, down Oak Street, with its better sidewalks than Mulberry, I bummed cigarette after cigarette from Adam. I’d been smoking them with him that night, which was something new to do—together—since returning from the West. From the university in Lubbock, that first year. From weekend visits to my cousin’s farm.
    Later, I convinced him to quit.
    The Strip-rat was not in the street anymore. When I looked at the Wailing Wall, I was tired. It showed something that couldn’t have been real, so I looked away. It was dark.
    It couldn’t have been real.
    I didn’t look back, in case it was.
    Around two corners, a few blocks away, someone was shouting into a bullhorn. They’d be on Meyer Street, which once contained the fronts of the Strip, before the renovation began. Nearby, there’d be the three-story Auditorium Building at the edge of campus. One of many massive buildings with cement walls behind brick walls between wet walls. We took our literature classes there, listening to musicians practice on the massive, one-of-a-kind organ in the heart of the building. In the auditorium that was no longer used.
    We’d scoped the building before. If you boarded up the glass windows, it’d be impenetrable. The Guard wouldn’t be able to take it except by siege if Salvage had holed up inside. There would be massive casualties on both sides, particularly for the invaders.
    The building had a basement, with a crawl space. You could use it to gain access to the municipal sewer line under Meyer. We had the specs.
    “In the event of a separation,” I said to the Party, “rendezvous in the Oak Street Building. In the courtyard.”
    I took ceramics classes in the Oak Street Building. It was behind us, over our shoulders really, a satellite just off the main campus.
    They nodded.
    “If you wait there, alone, for over an hour, fall back to the HOC.”
    Gunfire erupted. I heard the pneumatic grunts of nerve-agent cannons. It would be mild stuff, with a narrow radius.
    That
thing
, on the Wall, couldn’t have been real. There was nothing wrong with us. With the
Book
.
    The storefront windows went all at once, concussed from their frames. Books fell off the shelves easily. Between semesters, the university bookstore didn’t keep as many, so the shelves were lightly packed. You only had so long to sell your texts back before the next semester. They sent them back and then bought them again. Over and over, emptying and